What are Octoparse users saying about the software?

Octoparse for Professional Web Scraping

We scrape product data from suppliers and import them to our ecommerce and sync their prices and stock availability, and we do so even though our suppliers that fall into the scraping category do not provide XML or API but do have worthy products!

Pros

We use Octoparse to scrape product data from some of our suppliers that do not provide XML or API and import them to our ecommerce. We like the IP rotation feature because even the suppliers that provide XML or API block our requests, especially image links when we are trying to scrape them and download them, so IP rotation prevents us from this when we scrape data from users that do not provide XML/API.

Cons

The free plan is limited to low number of crawlers and concurrent runs as well as 10.000 records per export. It does not affect the companies though because companies like ours use the Standard or Professional plan.

I wish I had discovered this jewel years ago...

I have been crawling and parsing websites for a while, with use of php and cUrl. Years after years, it sounded clear that my extracting routines running on my server were more and more difficult to maintain in a good working shape. In fact, websites regularly change minor things on their pages, and in the best case, you wouldn't get anymore some or all of the awaited data, in the worse case, absolutely inaccurate data. Then came for me (and I must admit, my limited skills) THE hammer : AJAX ! Yes, html + Javascipt + css + dom... and the dynamic pages that don't load at first sight, that wait for you to click on a button, that just show as you scroll down, that exchange static pictures urls with javascipt dynamically shown pictures.. In two word : a nightmare ! So, I had to find a way to still be able to extract my needed data, without having to pass an engineer degree in information technology... had to be fast, had to be robust ! I gave a try to some scraping tools, and my final choice was made to Octoparse. Several reasons for it : easy to set up lots of tutorials to start easily Ajax is handled as easy as a basic html url... as if it wouldn't be any ajax routines on the pages. It's really what make me give a try... because I was unable to access the most important part of the data I needed... hidden behind an 'Display' Ajax button that I wasn't able to deal with (with php / cUrl) 10 tasks are offered for free, and as far I know, won't be public tasks as it's the case with some of Octoparse competitors Smart Mode and Wizard mode make it easy to find the data, often at first sight. Sometimes you need to find alternate ones... but Octoparse tries to do it for you. But of course, the Advanced Mode is the most important part ... and you don't need to start with it : Start with smart, or with wizard, and then Edit in Advanced Mode... and extract with accuracy what you need. I've been using kind of Xpath for years with php... but here, its easy and clear. You can even save a data extraction configuration files, to be used in new project, or elsewhere. The only drawback I have noticed, is that Octoparse uses mostly children/children/children xpath ways, that seems, to me, less robust than locations with specific attributes like class, id, or others, when Wizard Mode is used. But you can make it more robust and edit it in the advanced mode. It should definitively help me to gain a lot of time... and money (as far as I'm able to set up the APIs

Pros

Barely, you can start to use it easily without never having heard about xPath

Cons

Not one single API link in free mode, not one possibility to upload a single - even limited - task in the cloud, to test the speed difference with local extraction...

Traped

I try to crawl some literature ecom articles using their template, but it doesn't work, it kept to freeze. So crawling the data was impossible, the system will stopped before finished the entire data crawling.

Pros

website showing you that is a great software...

Cons

working themes and a notification before cut plan cost... before trial end....

Octoparse Review

The software is much easier to use, visually appealing, and on going customer support as well as tutorials have been created with the user in mind. Octoparse Web Scraper Experience: I have been looking professional web scraper for about two months now. I did try so many software's. Some was hidden mist! Most did not work at all. Then I did end up to get Octoparse web scraper! Wau! That cloud base software was exactly what I was looking for! This software really works. Software works even with some of the complex website. I definitely recommend! I use Octoparse on a daily basis and at my organization. there is no smoother way of web scraping! The software has never given me any issues. I think nobody can find better software to scrape data from web. Software It works exactly as expected. Octoparse is easy to use interface no experience scrapping websites is needed - but can do a lot. Octoparse software It has enabled me to ingest a large number of data point and focus my time on statistical analysis vs. data collection. It has safe me some much time! Same jobs would take me hours before and now data is collected in few minutes! When I need a quick way to grab structured web data, Octoparse software will be my first choice. It took time to learn the tool, but when you master it - there are lot's of powerful features. In just few days I managed to extract product information from thousands of products with very little effort! Using Octoparse to scrape a lot of data we needed was MUCH faster than custom building any solution. The user interface is intuitive, pricing very reasonable, and support was outstanding! To put it simply, if you've ever found a website where you wished that you could copy/paste hundreds of records from. Then Octoparse is your solution. It can automatically collect complete content structures such as product catalogs or search results. It's very user-friendly, yet sophisticated enough to extract data from highly dynamic websites. Octoparse software is data extraction tool that anyone can use to get data from the web. You'll never have to write a web scraper again and can easily create APIs from websites that don't have them. Octoparse software can handle interactive maps, calendars, search, forums, nested comments, infinite scrolling, authentication, dropdowns, forms, Javascript, Ajax and much more. Octoparse software is really the tool for your company!

Pros

easy to use.

Cons

Cost

Easy to start using, no coding required.

It took me about a day to look into all available web scrapers. At the end stopped on Octoparse for couple reasons. Pros: - Installs on Windows, so I could use spare Windows Server for scraping. No nodejs learning or programming needed. - GUI was simple to understand, can dump a list of links that need to be scraped, select content on the page that needs to go into Excel spreadsheet and click start. That's it, no need to select specific HTML divs or write regex code. Don't know how, but this was the only scraper that could analyze and grab a specific text on the page without setting any rules, the other scrapers I've tried had a hard time and had to make complicated rules. - During scraping opens the pages in a real browser, so Javascript, AJAX websites would work as well. - You can export to Excel, directly to SQL, MYSQ or Oracle database, CSV, TXT or HTML file. - You can also back up your scraped data to Octoparse as a backup, will be saved with your task. - Configuration and scraper apps run in different programs. If one suddenly would to shut down because of some error, other Octoparse tasks would still continue to work as nothing has happened. Cons: - Had a hard time adding a list of 50000 links into the queue, but not a problem because you can have multiple tasks 30-40K links in my case, just divide links between those tasks. - Did not say anywhere that it was saving the tasks to their servers, so that's why probably has trouble with large tasks. On the other hand, this one is also a Pro, because you can create tasks on your computer and load them up on your server just by restarting the app. Overall: You can have 2 active tasks running at the same time for free, if you want more, you can upgrade to a paid version. It takes about a second to open a page, so roughly you can scrape one page per second per task. Overall this worked better than great. Did not have to ask our devs to write a scraper, the time I spent creating the scraper would be the same amount of time I would spend discussing with our devs how to scrape the content. And now devs are asking me for stats on scraped data, not the other way around. If you do any marketing and wish to gather data for stats or just create your database from any website, super easy to do, recommend it.

Octoparse ! Great Product

After searching and searching for a data-service. I couldn't quite fine one that would meet my needs. Then came Octoparse. At first I was hesitant to use. However after watching several tutorials. I could tell the Octoparse team spent alot of time making it easy to use. Octoparse is an extremely powerful tool that has optimized and pushed our data scraping efforts to the next level. I would recommend this service to anyone. The price for the value provides a large return on the investment. For the free version, which works great, you can run at least 10 tasks at a time. However, these tasks are ran simultaneously in the background of the computer application. In my opinion buying any of the plans that allow you to use the cloud interface is very helpful and provides a good bit of flexibity. You can close out of the application and know that Octoparse is running on a server somewhere. My favorite feature is the multi-export options that are provided (csv, microsoft excel old & new, TXT, html). Octoparse doesn't require you to have any knowledge of coding which is helpful. However, knowing simple x-code shortcuts makes Octoparse even more powerful because you can create your own custom script that will run based on your need. The walkthrough tutorials when you first start I think is what really changes the game for Octoparse. Every once in a while. I have issues with Octoparse shutting down or troubles exporting. However, Octoparse support is super quick and reliable. The bill payment is very trustworthy as well. Octoparse also offers proxy capabilities, and the ability to turn off images to speed up the process. Another addition in the cloud settings is the ability to denote and categorize tasks based on its status. I know this may seem like a no-brainer feature. However it is super helpful to know the status or time of when multiple tasks will be completed so I can plan the extraction. I have heard great things about the API capabilities, however I haven't had time to figure it out. Next on my list. All in all Octoparse offers a wide range of features and I'm happy to have used it.

Pros

The amazing and never-ending features

Cons

Cost

Best scraper.

When we were looking for an appropriate scraping software we tried every scraping program available on the market. After some days of testing it turned out that Octoparse is exactly that what we were looking for. This great and powerful tool completely outclasses competition in most of hard tasks: -it can load and pass through very complex and big websites -you can set more complex logic which is very useful even if rarely used -there are practically no websites that Octoparse can't load, doesn't matter on what base and system they were built -friendly environment, with easy to use GUI -great support with honest, and kind people. -and everything without a single line of script which is great! There are, of course, some cons too, because nothing is perfect and that's a normal thing. Sometimes program hangs on some sites. After some observations, it came out that it is not a website problem. It happens on sites that are built similar to for example Wikipedia, which construction is practically the same under every link. Probably it is not the API in workflow for designer too, because it is about simple: loop by list of URL -> extract data. Especially when there are more links. Sometimes it shows that site is still loading, sometimes just hangs on one opened page for hours to then just move on. I note that I used all program options, including advanced options too including timeout limit, reload web page and every other option. Nothing has helped. Finally, functionalities and enhancements that can be added in the future to Octoparse, to further improve it: Example situation: We add a 100 links to the program and 17 of them failed to execute. We found out that reload website option is unclear. If we e.g. use proxy and the connection will fail with it, we can now use other proxy or few proxies depending on settings. It will be great if i.e. one proxy will fail at connection in specified number of attempts (let's say 5-15 attempts) then Octoparse will delete this proxy or mark it as malfunctioning and avoid it in the future, still returning these 17 bad link in scores. And it will be even better if score list after export will have links that failed to execute, just mark them in a separate column, or add website status error code or something. This can help in retry to get data from the websites that failed to load.

Perfect option for automating data scraping

Without getting into coding scripts, Octoparse is hands down the best system that I tested for automated data scraping. I tried other RPA and scraping systems and each one had serious deficiencies.

Pros

I used Octoparse to automate the process of scraping product data from e-commerce marketplaces like Etsy. This made it extremely easy. I signed up for a paid account and it was so nice to have jobs run in the cloud without having to run them on my local machine. Scraping large amounts of data was also a lot quicker than I thought it would be because it splits the jobs into multiple threads.

Cons

The overall UX would be simplified and improved a bit. It takes time to learn the quirks and get working. Some of the quirks I encountered I think had more to do with the structure of the data on the site than with Octoparse. That being said, I still feel like it could be simplified a bit more.

Octoparse is a powerful data extraction tool and it has added so much value to my job

This is web data extraction made simple and faster. Try it out

Pros

It is an outstanding product with very great capabilities especially for research work, and it is prizing is within reach.

Cons

It took some time before i was confident of my capabilities to use the App, but I can surely say that it is worth the time sacrificed to know how it works

Octopus review

it made lot simple our deployment process to push the changes to different clients at a time.

Pros

I liked the tentacles concept that will be useful to push the changes to more than one area/customer. it works really great to implement CI/CD when working with TeamCity to build your software. I like the creation of variable to manage different environments to deploy our product.

Cons

UI can be more enhanced for better quality. creation channels needs to be improved. it would be nice if we have an option to auto email option built in with results of each deployment.

Best free scraper softare

We are using Octoparse to scrape pages, and we find it extremely powerful. The free tool is good for users that don't need to use many queriesm, and don't need more than 2000 results extracted. After that limit either you can buy the upgrades, or you can split the files. The wizard is simple, the advanced is rather difficult to use, if you are not a developer. We would love to use some of the advanced functionalities, if they could be 'moved' to the simple side (considering that the scraper is intended mostly for nondevelopers). The wizard mode gives you the possibility to choose between: 1. list or table extraction 2. list and detail extraction 3. URL list extraction 4. single page extraction Depending on your needs, it could be good to extract all the fields from a single page (point 4) or extract data in the form of a table (page 1). We mainly use list and detail extraction, where you just need to provide a result page of a query on a first step, in and define the list of similar URLs you need to extract. Octoparse will detect the list automatically just after your second selection. On the next step you would need to instruct Octoparse on the fields you wish to extract. For each field, you can decide to extract the text, the inner HTML, the outer HTML, or the links behind the text (for example email addresses or internet addresses). We find this functionality extremely good. In the simple mode (free) the speed is based on your computer and on your internet speed. If you don't need to extract more than 2000 pages per time, the free version is good enough. If instead, you upgrade to the most advanced plans, you can use the speed of multiple servers CPU and run many tasks at the same time. If the list and extraction are not providing results, because it is difficult for Octopars to find out the URLs on a result page, we do use the URL list extraction. With this functionality you simply provide the crawler with a list of similar URL you need to crawl and the rest will be done automatically.

Pros

Free Easy to use

Cons

Advanced features a bit complicated

best free Data extraction Software

I am a freelancer in the 3 largest online marketplace in Indonesia and of course social media since 2014 when I graduated high school, my job selling other people's products or so-called reseller or a dropshipper Sure you've heard To sell these products, of course I had to have a catalog package in advance, but a problem arises, not all sellers have their own catalog, so I had to copy every product they sell one by one, Of course this is very tiring when we need to copy thousands and even hundreds of thousands of products one by one, to get the 100-200 product I need at least 2-3 days to complete it, here I am trying to find something on the internet and I found what is called octoparse. With Octoparse I can automatically retrieve the content of the products I wanted to sell, from the name of the goods, price, weight, description, and of course the image of the product, of course, is like an oasis in the desert that is very arid, as before I use this tool, I was only able to take the product as much as 5,000 to 50,000 in a day, and sales also increased, before selling 1-5 products in one week, and after I use this tool, I was able to sell 1-5 products in one day , This tool is extremely easy to run them, because her look very familiar, we just need to hover over the content we want, and you can choose what data you want to extract (such as Text, image URLs, etc.) are very helpful people like me which do not have basic knowledge of programming. And there is also no support Cloud Extractor, very helpful for someone with Internet resources is lacking, you can choose the final result as what you want (such as CSV, TXT, HTML). Because to be honest this tool is very slow when your internet is not good. Hopefully, future cloud extractor is also available for free,: D due to the small actors like me, this is a very big price. And sorry for my English.

Octoparse as the most friendly and intuitive web data extraction tool

I have tried about 20 web data extraction software incl. online ones and desktop apps. I have stopped at Octoparse as for me it appeared to be the best option because: 1. it offers a "linear" (in the good sense) and convergent workflow for a job versus the rather messy and distractingly branching/forking semantics of the process of other software where after a certain point you lose the touch/control because of steeply growing complexity along the steps of the workflow (this problem with other software is even more severe when the workflow steps are named in quite an arbitrary manner by the vendor leaving you without any clues as to what the given step is about or how you are supposed to carry it out, etc.); 2. its workflow is simple/straightforward, friendly and intuitive - with Octoparse you do not need hours or days of training/reading of instructions, tutorials, etc. as is the case with the other software I have tried/tried to go through; the process is highly structured and coherent in Octoparse; 3. it does not require any specialized/professional skills of any kind of coding. As a possible drawback I would point to the relatively weak consistency among the offerred 4 modes of extraction. I have noticed that there are a few inconsistencies in step logic mapping/matching across some of them, but I have not explored all of them to be honest, so this problem may in fact be less significant. Thank you.

Pros

- it is simple, friendly, intuitive and features a linear/convergent (in the good sense) process of interaction - it does not take even hours of training/reading the instructions, tutorials - you start using it straight away - it does not require any coding skills

Cons

- relatively weak consistency in the logics of workflow steps across/among the four modes of extraction

Octoparse is the best free solution for web scraping

Octoparse offers a free scraping GUI for everyone without coding experience. The free local extraction feature is enough for almost any business starter or data collector. I mean its great you can handle all types of pagination from infinite scroll or ajax called also including the normal button pagination. Its a nightmare to develop something like this from scratch using php. I mean Octoparse are like the middle man from the web and the perfect excel sheet with all data collected inside it formatted into columns and perfect rows just need to be adjusted into charts. Although the gui is a bit complicated for someone new to the software , the tutorials are very easy to track and the moving pictures for every step are awesome. After investing some time developing the local extraction mechanism ,you can export the project to the cloud extraction as it will be much easier to use also because that is the logical step for the next move if you want to scrap large scales of data or you dont have to worry about schedule , it is in the cloud and running smoothly. The API integration also make it easier to use the data. Exporting the data via API is one of the solutions , you also can export them in various file formats including csv. You can build mobile app directly on the API and with some patience you can get more reliable data at your hand any time. I am as a wordpress developer use the api to integrate in the wordpress itself including other plugins like the woocommerce for eCommerce platform. Giant price comparison companies use the sam emethod to scarp data and publish them to their web , we can do the same with much less work using Octoparse ! Why to re-invent the wheel ?! time is money !

Pros

Complete framework to scarp

Cons

GUI is a bit complicated

Octoparse is a great web scraper to make a price monitor!

Pros

Octoparse is really a great data extraction tool to scrape product information online. As a e-commerce owner, I need to keep an eye on price. With the help of Octoparse cloud service, I just need to make a simple crawler(no coding needed actually) to extract the product price and then schedule the crawler to run every day automatically to get the updated data. It really saves me a lot of time and the extracted data helps me make a wise strategy. That's why I choose the premium plan despite of the powerful function of the free plan. Furthermore, Octoparse now is offering great discounts for new users and give continuous support to the old users. It is really worth a try.

Cons

Some websites need to modify the XPath if you want to exactly get the data you want. This would be a little difficult for me at first. But with the help of abundant tutorials and XPath tool, I finally got it!

Octoparse is really a good data extraction tool. It helps me a lot for my academic research.

Pros

I like Octoparse Cloud Service most. I need to update the data every day and the cloud service enables me to schedule the crawlers run daily on Octoparse cloud servers automatically without having to keep my computer on. This really save me a lot of time and help me get a lot of original data online for my academic research. Besides, I do appreciate they offer great discounts for us students. It is really helpful to me.

Cons

Sometimes the support replied a little late. It would be better if they could reply a little earlier.

Octoparse is the best web scraping tool to extract data!

Pros

I like Octoparse cloud service best. It allows me to schedule my task and run at regular time, thus I could get the updated data automatically every day. Also, it has strong functions to extract different kinds of websites, which is really brilliant. The pricing is acceptable compared to other data extraction tools, no matter to say that it provides discounts for journalism.

Cons

It would take you a little time to start your first task. But with the help of its detailed tutorials, you could finally make it.

A great free web scraper to extract data online within seconds

Pros

I use Octoparse to extract the comments on Twitter for my academic research. It did really help as you just need to make a simple crawler to extract the data online automatically. Though at first I didn't have any idea on how to make a crawler, I finally made it with the help of the detailed tutorials and support team. The free version is quite powerful since it could scrape almost every website. But I need the CLOUD SERVICE to schedule the tasks to run every day to get the updated data. That's why I choose the premium plan. With the great discounts offered specially for academic research, it's not a problem to afford that for us students.

Cons

It couldn't solve the Captcha problem on cloud service and I had to do that in local machine if I want to extract such kind of websites.

Great Data extraction tool!

Pros

Cost . I'm a Sales manager and have to deal with massive profiles of customer. Every info was unstructured data and was hard to read through, which caused much headache. That was a luck a friend introduced Octoparse to me, a great web scraping tool, it boosted much of my work efficiency, and my team succeeding in exceeding sales target. Great software! Great Help!

Cons

Customer support

Helpful Extraction Tool!

Pros

Point-and-Click interface. this feature makes me feel arranged while I'm using Octoparse, it's clear to see which step I am in, and what step should I do next.

Cons

Customer Support. the customer supports dont reply instantly, sometimes it takes hours to reply my e-mails.

Great Data Extraction Tool!

Pros

Comparing to other popular extractors, the price is very worthy, and its functions work very well, fulfill my needs with a lower price.

Cons

Though it doesnt need to code, but it requires a series of tutorials before I got started. It's a good thing it didn't take so long.

A bit clunky, but the best tool for the money

Can be frustrating to use, but is otherwise a very feature-rich, robust tool.

Pros

Very robust builder. You can do a lot with their tool and have almost limitless options for building. Their support is slow but very helpful.

Cons

Their support seems to be on an Asian time zone, so responses can be 12-24 hours. That is frustrating, but they are otherwise very helpful. The interface is also cumbersome.

Web Scraping

Octoparse is the best software for web data extraction software.It is fast and get data from all the pages without putting a single pieces of code, just design your workflow and all the data will be exported in excel or you can integrate with a database. It a software that is extremely easy to use and navigate,once you start using it , you will feel that is very important for your business and your ordinary job. For me this software was a solution for my problems , and now i don't get the data i want manually but i have octaparse, and i am very happy i got it.

Pros

Performance,easy to use,get data from all websites

Great for data scraping

Octoparse lets our company free up time to do other projects. We are able to set up data projects in Octoparse and it goes right to work doing what we could never do in the amount of time it takes. We love using Octoaparse for our data scraping needs.

Pros

There are a lot ways to scrape data from several different sites. Ocotparse also offers lots of tutorials if you are unsure of how to scrape data from certain sites.

Cons

There are some features that might be hard to understand how to use if you do not have a basic understanding of coding. Ocotparse does provide many how to guides to help those that do not have a good background in coding.

Octoparse is a helpful web scraping tool!

Pros

Never knew data extraction could be such an easy thing before I discovered Octoparse. It fulfills the functions I expected, I can easily obtain data I wish now.

Cons

I have not do any comparison with other brands, Octoparse was the first web scraping tool I ever used. If there were any con I would say it's that the websites claim users do not need to code, but users still need to learn a bunch of tutorials before use.